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Building Browser Games

Ever wanted to build a browser game?

Building Browsergames (http://buildingbrowsergames.com) is a blog geared towards the beginning to intermediate developer that is interested in building their own browsergame. It provides insights in different technologies used, has frequent blog updates, and offers an exentisve list of tutorials to get started yourself! Find everything you need to know to build your own browser game!

As a bonus, the developer of http://buildingbrowsergames.com is here on our forums! You can ask him anything directly in this thread and he will answer you.

I'm afraid you're incorrect, Eriond - as I'm the primary editor/owner of Building Browsergames. Roxane was just interested in getting the word out.

firesnowball: what language is your game built in? The tools you're using will affect your hosting options - if you want to build your game with Ruby on Rails or Django, you're looking at something like dedicated hosting or a VPS, as most shared hosts tend not to offer the setup that you'll be looking for.

On the other hand, if you're building your game with PHP, virtually any shared host will do - how much are you looking to spend? Personally, I use Slicehost for all of my hosting needs, but they're a bit pricey($20 USD/month) if you're just starting out and don't know what you're doing. If all you need is a place to put your game, shared hosting should do you just fine.

Or you can can make your computer a web server :P, very easy, and its free , although i wouldn't suggest sortten your codes like <?php will become <?... it becomes weird, and some shared hosting/hosting websites don't allow short cuts, atleast the ones i used.

Or you can can make your computer a web server :P, very easy, and its free , although i wouldn't suggest sortten your codes like <?php will become <?... it becomes weird, and some shared hosting/hosting websites don't allow short cuts, atleast the ones i used.

It's a good idea; but most ISPs don't allow you to do this, and can actually terminate service if they catch you at it.

On the other hand, if you're building your game with PHP, virtually any shared host will do - how much are you looking to spend? Personally, I use Slicehost for all of my hosting needs, but they're a bit pricey($20 USD/month) if you're just starting out and don't know what you're doing. If all you need is a place to put your game, shared hosting should do you just fine.

What about speed, however? If we assume you are developing a PHP MMO which may have 500+ people connected simultaneously won't a dedicated server be required to handle the bandwidth? Also you may end up paying for extra bandwidth your users are taking up.

What about speed, however? If we assume you are developing a PHP MMO which may have 500+ people connected simultaneously won't a dedicated server be required to handle the bandwidth? Also you may end up paying for extra bandwidth your users are taking up.

I would be wary of making "you need a dedicated server when [foo]" statements - your game's needs will dictate what sort of server you need(and if you encounter speed problems, you should benchmark your game to try and figure out where the slowdowns are; dedicated servers are not an instant solution to any problems). If you have 1000 players simultaneously connected but are only serving flat files or cached pages to them, you'll be able to support far more players on a smaller server(or shared hosting) than you would with 25 players connected to pages that are running thousands of calculations.

Bandwidth requirements are also something that vary from game to game - an image heavy game will easily chew through two or more times the amount of bandwidth that a game without images will use - again, it all depends on the specifics of your game. Personally, I have yet to encounter a situation where the amount of bandwidth that a host provided me with wasn't more than enough for what I needed.

I have made several browser games in the past (Nickotopia, Neranex), and I would like to add a few remarks to building a browser game.

If you are making a true browser game, one that solely uses clicks to make requests I believe you should use a good webhost with PHP and MySQL. Although bandwidth is important, it is as much of an importance as it would be on any other sites. I don't think a browser game chews up more bandwidth. I made a mmorpg using keystrokes and AJAX, and it was really fast enough.

If you are make a browser game that reads keystrokes, but not necessarily uses a flash or java apllet, I think you might want to try hosting on your own. One of the benefits is that you can use an external server which can connect straight to your site's database. This was one of my disadvantages for a school project we had, since we couldn't display the user stats on our webpage for a certain player from the game server. Most hosts don't like it when you want an external application to connect to your site's database.

As far as bandwidth is concerned you have allot of options. Images tend to take up a large bulk of bandwidth. Here are some strategies we have looked into during the development of legacy of warriors:

Image compression
You can adjust the compression of jpegs, and if your images fit within the 256color range you can make them 8 bit pngs, have a look online for jpegtran, pngcrush and pngquant.

Cache control
Make sure the images are being cached in the browser so that users arenít downloading them every time they visit a page.

CSS Sprites
You can combine multiple images into one and use background-position to get the individual images out. This reduces number of requests and can help with compression if the images have any similarities.

Game Dev Team Question

I am looking to build a game similar in action as Dark Orbit. Not quite a clone, but the programming would be closer to this game than any other. I am looking for any advice to putting my team together, the programming language needed (like Flash/Flex) and any other things I might not be considering.

I am a PHP, business applications developer and graphic designer (comes with the territory), so not completely clueless.

I have quotes from outsourced companies (India, checkoslovakia, etc..) but am worried about distance and communications issues.

I am also looking to learn how to do it myself if need be as my efforts to recruit developers in California has greatly failed. Thanks in advance for any advice.